A team of researchers at Yale University has developed a new kind of algorithm to improve the functionally of a robot hand. In their paper published in the journal Science Robotics, the group describes their algorithm and then demonstrate, via videos, how it can be used.

By Clara Marc

There is strength in numbers. That’s true not only for humans, but for drones too. By flying in a swarm, they can cover larger areas and collect a wider range of data, since each drone can be equipped with different sensors.

Preventing drones from bumping into each other
One reason why drone swarms haven’t been used more widely is the risk of gridlock within the swarm. Studies on the collective movement of animals show that each agent tends to coordinate its movements with the others, adjusting its trajectory so as to keep a safe inter-agent distance or to travel in alignment, for example.

“In a drone swarm, when one drone changes its trajectory to avoid an obstacle, its neighbors automatically synchronize their movements accordingly,” says Dario Floreano, a professor at EPFL’s School of Engineering and head of the Laboratory of Intelligent Systems (LIS). “But that often causes the swarm to slow down, generates gridlock within the swarm or even leads to collisions.”

Not just reacting, but also predicting
Enrica Soria, a PhD student at LIS, has come up with a new method for getting around that problem. She has developed a predictive control model that allows drones to not just react to others in a swarm, but also to anticipate their own movements and predict those of their neighbors. “Our model gives drones the ability to determine when a neighbor is about to slow down, meaning the slowdown has less of an effect on their own flight,” says Soria. The model works by programing in locally controlled, simple rules, such as a minimum inter-agent distance to maintain, a set velocity to keep, or a specific direction to follow. Soria’s work has just been published in Nature Machine Intelligence.

With Soria’s model, drones are much less dependent on commands issued by a central computer. Drones in aerial light shows, for example, get their instructions from a computer that calculates each one’s trajectory to avoid a collision. “But with our model, drones are commanded using local information and can modify their trajectories autonomously,” says Soria.

A model inspired by nature
Tests run at LIS show that Soria’s system improves the speed, order and safety of drone swarms in areas with a lot of obstacles. “We don’t yet know if, or to what extent, animals are able to predict the movements of those around them,” says Floreano. “But biologists have recently suggested that the synchronized direction changes observed in some large groups would require a more sophisticated cognitive ability than what has been believed until now.”

References

• PAPER – Predictive control of aerial swarms in cluttered environments. Soria, E., Schiano, F. and Floreano, D., Nat Mach Intell (2021). DOI: 10.1038/s42256-021-00341-y

The models that robots use to do tasks work well in the structured environment of the laboratory. Outside the lab, however, even the most sophisticated models may prove inadequate in new situations or in difficult to model tasks, such as working with soft materials like rope and cloth.

Low demand scenarios necessitate a different strategy: tools that can produce more pieces per edge while providing process security. Here, the goal should be fewer production interruptions and the capability to run unmanned production.

Learn about the SOTA recommender system models. From collaborative filtering and factorization machines to DCN and DLRM

Using a robotic 'Third Thumb' can impact how the hand is represented in the brain, finds a new study led by UCL researchers.

The rhythmic motions of hair-like cilia move liquids around cells or propel the cells themselves. In nature, cilia flap independently, and mimicking these movements with artificial materials requires complex mechanisms. Now, researchers reporting in ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces have made artificial cilia that move in a wave-like fashion when a rotating magnetic field is applied, making them suitable for versatile, climbing soft robots and microfluidic devices.

Research focusing on swarm robotics typically uses theoretical approaches to describe robotic systems in an abstract way. A theoretical model that is often used in robotics studies is OBLOT, an approach that represents robots as simple systems, all identical, without a memory and unable to communicate with each other.

Last month, Stäubli introduced 5 new models of tool changers to round out our MPS product line. These new models open up much of the smaller payload robots to using tool changers.

This episode is about learning the options you have to get some money to start your startup and what is expected you achieve with that money.

In this podcast series of episodes we are going to explain how to create a robotics startup step by step.

We are going to learn how to select your co-founders, your team, how to look for investors, how to test your ideas, how to get customers, how to reach your market, how to build your product… Starting from zero, how to build a successful robotics startup.

I’m Ricardo Tellez, CEO and co-founder of The Construct startup, a robotics startup at which we deliver the best learning experience to become a ROS Developer, that is, to learn how to program robots with ROS.

Our company is already 5 years long, we are a team of 10 people working around the world. We have more than 100.000 students, and tens of Universities around the world use our online academy to provide the teaching environment to their students.

We have bootstrapped our startup, but we also (unsuccessfully) tried getting investors. We have done a few pivots and finally ended at the point that we are right now.

With all this experience, I’m going to teach you how to build your own startup. And we are going to go through the process by creating ourselves another startup, so you can see in the path how to create your own. So you are going to witness the creation of such robotics startup.

Subscribe to the podcast using any of the following methods

• ROS Developers Podcast on iTunes
• ROS Developers Podcast on Stitcher
• ROS Developers Podcast on Spotify

Or watch the video

The post 94. How to build a robotics startup: getting some money to start appeared first on The Construct.

Machine designers are increasingly asked to build systems that take up less space, operate on less power, and run with higher performance. Thankfully motion controls are answering the call with new motors, new sensors, and new architectures.

On May 14, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) ship Okeanos Explorer will depart from Port Canaveral in Florida on a two-week expedition led by NOAA Ocean Exploration, featuring the technology demonstration of an autonomous underwater vehicle. Called Orpheus, this new class of submersible robot will showcase a system that will help it find its way and identify interesting scientific features on the seafloor.

Sometimes, one robot isn't enough.

According to a recent report from the World Economic Forum, 85 million jobs could be lost and displaced by new technologies in the next five years. It’s no surprise that workers, particularly in manufacturing, worry how these developments will affect their jobs.

The Seinfeld idiom, “worlds are colliding,” is probably the best description of work in the age of Corona. Pre-pandemic, it was easy to departmentalize one’s professional life from one’s home existence. Clearly, my dishpan hands have hindered my writing schedule. Thank goodness for the robots in my life, scrubbing and vacuuming my floors; if only they could power themselves with the crumbs they suck up.

The World Bank estimates that 3.5 million tons of solid waste is produced by humans everyday, with America accounting for more than 250 million tons a year or over 4 pounds of trash per citizen. This figure does not include the 34 billion gallons of human organic materials that is processed in water treatment centers across the country each year. To the fictional Dr. Emmett Brown, this garbage is akin to “black gold” – ecologically powering cities, cars, and machines. In reality, the movie, “Back to The Future II” was inspired by the biomass gasification movement of 20th century in powering cars with wood during World War II when petroleum was scarce. The technology has advanced so much that a few years ago the GENeco water treatment plant in the United Kingdom built a biomethane gas bus that relied solely on sewage. In reflecting on the importance of the technology, Collin Field of Bath Bus Company declared, “We will never, ever, ever, while we are on this planet, run out of human waste.”

Less than twenty miles away from the GENco plant, Professor Loannis Leropoulos of the University of Bristol’s Robotics Laboratory is working on the next generation of bio-engineered fuel cells. Last week, Dr. Leropoulos demonstrated his revolutionary Microbial Fuel Cells (MFCs) for me. As witnessed, he is not just inspired by nature, but harnessing its beauty to power the next generation of robots. The MFCs mimic an animal’s stomach with microbes breaking down food to create adenosine triphosphate (ATP). The Bristol lab began building MFCs to power its suite of EcoBots. “I started this journey about twenty years ago with the main purpose of building sustainable autonomous robots for remote area access,” reflects Leropoulos. He was inspired by Dr. Stuart Wilkinson’s Gastrobot in the early 2000s that first promoted the idea of “an intelligent machine that digests real food for energy.” At the time the media hyped Wilkinson’s invention as a flesh-eating robot, when in reality it digested sugar cubes, turning the carbohydrates into electrical energy. Unfortunately, the Gastrobot’s clumsy oversized form factor suffered from long charging times with an 18-hour “carbo-loading” process for every 15 minutes of power.

Springboarding off of Wilkinson’s concept, Leropoulos’ team started with the idea of using MFC to power machines by putting the microbes directly inside the unit to more efficiently produce energy from any sugar-based substance, even waste (e.g., urine, feces, and trash). The Professor described the elegance of his technology that creates a “uniform colonization” of microbes multiplying every 8 minutes with parent lifecycles succeeded by daughter cells in a continuous pattern of ‘feed-growth-energy’. He compares it to the human microflora process of breaking down fresh food in the digestive system that results in healthy bathroom visits, “the same is with Microbial Fuel Cells as long as we continue feeding them, the MFCs will continue to generate electricity.” The Bristol professor boasts that batteries are better performing than anything on the market as biological lifeforms have no denigration since “the progeny keep refreshing the community or electrodes so we have stable levels of power.” By contrast, the most popular non-fossil fuel available, lithium, degrades over time and leads to destructive mining practices in scarring the Earth in search of declining ore resources with the explosion of mobile phones, portable devices, and electric vehicles.

While MFCs are still in their infancy, Leropoulos shared with me his plan for commercializing the invention. His lab recently announced the success of its MFCs prototypes in powering mobile phones, smart watches, and other devices (including the EcoBots). In addition, Leropoulos has pushed his team to miniaturize the size of his batteries from its 6″ prototype to smaller than a AA, while at the same time rivaling the performance of alkaline. Backed by the Gates foundation, he has also reduced the production costs from $18 to $1 a unit, this is before achieving the economies of scale with mass production. Today, his business plan has expanded beyond just autonomous robots to power smart homes, by connecting multiple MFCs to a house’s sanitation and waste systems. “Our research is all about optimizing miniaturization and stacking them with minimum losses so we can end up with a car battery-like shape and size that gives us the amount of power we require,” explains the professor. When I questioned Leropoulos about using MFCs in the future of autonomous fleets, and even to offset the high energy demands of something like bitcoin mining, he remarked, “It would be naive of me to say a straight yes, but this is of course the work we are doing. I strongly believe with the development of new materials that will help with the energy density. We are at a stage where we have done some groundbreaking research using 3D printed electric materials as a low cost scalable technology. There is a lot to say about the functionalization of the electrodes that enables colonization from the microbes in making sure all the progeny cells colonize and the ceramic separators that allows for target ion transfer that makes the whole operation smarter and more efficient.” In thinking more about his work, he declared, “We have yet to see the full potential of Microbial Fuel Cells. I do think one day we will have a ‘Back to the Future’ scenario, feeding your food scraps to your car,”

Pressing Leropoulos on how he envisions robot-charging stations working in a factory or home in the near future, he illustrated it best, “with a Roomba example its actually picking of food scraps in the kitchen that would be a very nutritious source of fuel for the Microbial Fuel Cell, but that’s a few steps down the line.” He continued, “a straightforward application for something like a Roomba is to leave the charging station where it is and connect it to the toilet or kitchen sink. The fuel cycle would be continuous as the robot would not be drawing energy from the house, but the wastewater.” Processing the impact of his vision, it took me back to the early days of the global pandemic shutdown with animals returning to ancient grazing areas and pollution clouds clearing over heavily populated areas with many seeing for the first time distant mountains and blue skies. Innovations like MFCs are part of a new wave of mechatronic environmentally-focused solutions. Before parting, I asked Leropoulos how hopeful is he about the environment, “I do feel optimistic, I have more faith in the the younger generation that they will do things better. The shock we sustained as a society [this past year] is a lesson in seeing the true color of our natural world, if we learn from this then I think the future is a good one.”